Also, it's worth noting that the only one of the above I actually like all that much is Firefly, so, six of one.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Hell, sometimes I don't recognize characters because they're from obscure source material. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Can I just mention how much we love this sort of independent initiative? Seriously. You save us a ton of time when you JFGI before coming around to ask. I could wish for a hundred more posters with Google skills. ;)

Ard Sumhenner
that Janice chick
Usual Suspect and general menace

I assume you're familiar with the JFGI site, in particular, hence that phrasing? I can't remember where I read about it, but it's wonderfully useful on newbie-ridden mailing lists :)

(edit: stupid forum link code)

yeah, well, my sig makes itself known...

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"

It has the benefits of letting others add stuff, without as many of the drawbacks of a simple fan-made site..

I can only imagine the kind of crosslinks that would occur within wiki because of it.

EDIT: I should really start reading *all* of a thread before I toss in my two cents...the wiki idea was already suggested. I obviously like it, though. :)

That would be very dangerous. The Wikipedia gets a lot of mainstream attention nowadays - viz. the whole flap with John Byrne mangling his own entry - and an EPU page there would be exactly the kind of publicity we don't need. it's a slightly bitter irony that fanfic - especially big crossover fanfic - survives on a kind of obscurity.

Jesus God Almighty. I can't begin to imagine the horror that would result from a Wikipedia page written up by one or more of our more, shall we say, detail-oriented fans. It'd be like an IP attorney's travel guide to my colorectal tract. For the love of God, do not do this.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Simonz

One of the many "maybe we ought to do this sometime" projects on the figurative bulletin board at EPU HQ is a wiki for the BPGD and Hitchhiker's Guide material. Not that we'd follow the wikipedia.org model and throw it open for anyone and his duck to mess around with - man, does that idea make me edgy - but that we might use the wiki mechanism to make it easier for us to update the things and the readers to refer to them.

Hasn't happened yet, but it might go up the priority list once the new server's ready.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Don't worry about other people intruding - Wikispaces allows you to set a login name and password so only you and whoever else you want can login and make changes. if you'd like examples of Wikispaces, I have a Wiki for my work in progress there and Bob has one for his Drunkard's Walk Songs.

(Yes, I know, it's a bit of a shameless plug, but at least I'm also promoting someone else's stuff too ;)

Black Aeronaut Technologies Creative aerospace solutions for the discerning spacer "What? Under the dorsal guiding feathers!?"

Well, technically, I don't have one. One of my readers has one, with my tacit approval.

-- Bob
-------------------
Then the horns kicked in...
And my shoes started to squeak.

Black Aeronaut Technologies Creative aerospace solutions for the discerning spacer "What? Under the dorsal guiding feathers!?"

And that was Zoner's fault!

... now why is the board quoting back everybody's .sig? I thought I'd broken it of that irritating behavior... I must've toggled something I didn't mean to toggle when screwing around with the settings.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Well, Chad... congratulations. You've ensured that if he does get into UF, you'll get handed the task of writing all of his scenes.

(I speak from experience. Whose bright idea was it to bring Shinji into NXE? ;)

--truss.

It's as much my and Slarti's faults as it is Chad's. Cf. Etrigan...

Ard Sumhenner
that Janice chick
Usual Suspect and general menace

I'm in support of, this is true,
Yon Sting-resembling ne'er-do-well.
At least his lines are easier to do
Than the rhyming yellow beast from Hell.

:-)

Slarti

I still laugh at that mental image every time it comes up. Mainly because of the fact that I can almost imagine the "wait, wha?" expressions involved. ;P

-OM

On a related note: I've noticed that you seem reticent to use heavy-duty spellcasters, with the possible exception of Raven and some of the Cephiro bunch. Is this a conscious choice?

I guess you could call it that. UF is primarily sci-fi, so it's always a delicate task to mix in fantasy-derived elements without making the whole thing too weird to sustain. You'll notice that most of the sorcerous characters who are in the picture tend toward more hermetic sorts of traditions - their magic is almost a form of science itself.

Part of the problem is just that magic, if not very carefully constrained, has the potential to become the ultimate deus-ex-machina mechanism. Once unrestricted sorcery is on the table, almost any effect that may happen to be needed can be provided as a spell. This, I think, is why the very powerful mage characters in modern superhero comic books (Doctor Fate, et al.) are so often shuffled to the sidelines - it's hard to write for them without having them just take over and fix everything on page four. Writers end up finding artificial ways to gimp them (which is lame in itself) or having to grapple with the fact that, really, they should be powerful enough to solve the problem du jour without any kind of dramatic tension at all.

My fix for this, insofar as I've consciously devised one, is to limit magic's usefulness in the UF universe. It's not dead there, far from it, but it's also not particularly strong. It takes quite a bit of effort and quite a bit of skill to get anything terribly useful out of sorcery in Midgard, and a lot of the time you'd have been better off just doing whatever you're trying to do by hand. Most of the really powerful sorcerers in UF-Midgard aren't from there, either, which calls into play the question of bloodlines and predisposition. Take Raven as an example; she's probably one of the UF universe's most powerful (or potentially powerful) witches, and she's one-quarter svartelf and three-quarters Cephirean. (Cephiro has a stronger magisphere than Midgard, and thus tends to breed better sorcerers.) Illyana Rasputinya is from another dimension (by way of receiving her sorcerous training in still another dimension). And so on.

Thus, apart from a chosen few whose circumstances make them inclined toward that kind of power, most of the magic you'll see in Midgard is either tied to some kind of complex ritual that requires a lot of people to accomplish, bound up into an object or artifact, or actually something else altogether (the Force-sensitive, for instance, can pull off a number of stunts that look like magic to the casual observer).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

(I've been on a Doctor Strange kick of late. A lot of wasted potential, there).

Still, seeing Raven start murmuring "Darkness beyond twilight..." would amuse me to no end. :)

This is more or less what they did with Raven on Teen Titans; I've been vaguely trying to make her... I dunno... witchier without throwing everything out of balance in the process.

(I also threw a mild City of Heroes reference into her last major appearance, at the end of Last Transport, just for laughs. That spell she uses on General Zod is a Defender/Secondary/Dark Blast power called "Tenebrous Tentacles", and in the game it makes a deeply, deeply awesome sound effect. :)

>Still, seeing Raven start murmuring "Darkness beyond twilight..."
>would amuse me to no end. :)

Well, that spell is known to the Cephirean hermetic tradition... it's generally noisier than Raven cares to be, though. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Since the truly heavy hitters in magic, like Corwin and Belldandy and Skuld and the rest of the Aesir/Vanir, use power-limiters because of the damage they can do to Midgard just from sheer power...are demons and such restricted in the same way? I doubt they would care about the destruction they cause - would the reasoning be to avoid drawing attention? Not trying to nitpick, but it seems to me it could be a huge weakpoint for the forces of light.

-D-

I can't speak for UF, but this is the source material thread . . .

In the manga, Hild Queen of Demons wears four limiter seals, as opposed to Belldandy's one. They're bigger, too; they go all around her head and arms. She still causes a great deal of destruction, but the implication is that if not for the seals, she'd destroy her home plane just by walking around. This is widely considered to be plus-ungood.

The limited ability to use magic in the EPU universe would also explain the lack of 'magical girl' characters running around. That and Gryphon probably lumping most of them into the "overexposed" catagory like Ranma and DB. Of course, I reserve the right to be wrong, Especially if The character Gryphon starts dating Setsuna.....B-)

Craig

-------------
Lead me not to temptation, for I can find it myself.

Noooot exactly. Well, yea maybe, Usagi did appear, but only as her base personality. Nothing else was brought in, IIRC, from when *I* asked about it back when Hammer started getting active on the fori again.

The one 'magical girl' series I could see having anything at all to do with UF, really, would be 'Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha', which... well, to explain why would spoil a really neat surprise for anyone who hasn't seen the show. It's a fun little thing, available in fansubs, 13 episodes. Very well-written, turns the whole 'magical girl' premise on its head about as effectively as Neon Exodus Evangelion does for what NGE did to mecha shows.

Hm, I was wondering why that Hitchhiker's Guide article I sent you never saw the light of day again. :-)

(And for those of you who are wondering why I'm aware of this travesty of a card game--I do volunteer work with kids. Hey, you've got to take the bad with the good and the inane with the profound. I'd much rather play a good game of chess.)

--DocMui

It's amazing when you have, on a UF TV or as a guest appearance, shows that are still going today, rather than shows that no longer actually have a regular broadcast slot...

What I'd like to ask Gryphon and the gang is, as a sideline...
What sources from when you were writing the Core stories, and the first few spin-offs, do you no longer use?
(Like Bubblegum Crisis seems to have become very much unused since GENOM's original bosses were terminated, and Dirty Pair, for it being the literal source of the whole idea, seems to have become sidelined completely, with Kei and Yuri only appearing in throwaway references.)

One reason that the BGC cast isn't used much anymore is that 2 of them are dead (Priss and Nene) and the others are getting on in years. As for the Dir- *glances around nervously* er, Lovely Angels, Kei has beeen captured and Yuri spends most of her free time with Zoner or Larry Mann. Neither of which has been making many appearances of late in the stories. Plus the Symphonies (the majority of stories the last few years) mainly seem focused on the 'next generation'

-------------
Lead me not to temptation, for I can find it myself.

Oh, hard to say. These things are always in flux, you know, and the things that have come in from early sources are so ingrained in the universe now, in some cases, that they get used often without any conscious "hey, let's use X" thought on our part. (Macross is a good example of this. You see things from or derived from Macross and/or Robotech around all the time - Veritech fighters, Destroids, the term "Destroid", references to Zentraedi technology - but it's all part and parcel of the UF universe at this point, so there's no deliberate effort to "use Macross" when they come up nowadays.)

>(Like Bubblegum Crisis seems to have become very much unused since
>GENOM's original bosses were terminated

Well, GENOM's still very much around as a corporation in the UF universe, but there again, it's such a part of the universe's fabric that there's no direct effort to make a BGC reference when it appears.

As for the BGC characters themselves, as another poster has pointed out, at this point it's been 80 years since their native timeframe, and most of them are dead. I actually do have a couple of things in mind that may tie back to their corner of the universe, but, as with so much else that's kicking around in my head, it's all contingent on my ever having the time and energy to do anything with any of it.

>Dirty Pair, for it being
>the literal source of the whole idea, seems to have become sidelined
>completely, with Kei and Yuri only appearing in throwaway references.)

A lot of that comes down to expedience. There's only so much screen time to go around, and there's a lot of stuff going on in the "present day" UF universe. Plus, yeah, I'll acknowledge that I have a certain tendency to get preoccupied with introducing and establishing new things, sometimes at the expense of neglecting the earlier materials. Hey, it happens. But there again, as another poster has pointed out, the primary aim in the last few years' FI stuff was specifically to set up a new generation of characters.

Speaking metaphorically - treating the characters as actors for purposes of argument, if you will - Kei's a victim of the arc plot; she's off-screen for a specific purpose. Yuri, on the other hand, just hasn't been showing up for work much lately.

A lot of factors go into determining who gets screen time and when, and not all of them are under conscious control. Sorry...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Am I remembering correctly? IIRC, when last we saw Sylia and Mackie in UF (as opposed to in HL), they were both not only still around, but looking relatively youthful for their apparent ages? Didn't Priss & Nene both die on-screen while Linna died off-screen (and it was a rather typically fanficcie-type thing to happen to Linna-the-forgotten-KS - even mention of her passing, heroic though it was, is an afterthought! <g>)

Jeanne

"Believe me, if I have to go the rest of my life without companionship, knowing myself won't be a problem."
-- Gabrielle of Potadeia

		Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com

Yes, this is so; they have a brief appearance in A Day of Infamy, which is set in 2412, and they're both pretty well-preserved.

... of course, that's because they're androids, but hey.

Well, technically, I guess you'd have to call Sylia a gynoid. I mean, she's certainly not an artificial construct in the shape of a man.

Seriously, though, it wouldn't be all that unusual for them to still be alive then; in UF, Sylia established the Knight Sabers team of which Exiled G was a part of in 2331, and if we assume that she was around 30 when she did that, then in Infamy she'd be 112. That's just past middle age for a human living in the Core Sectors in the 2400s. The others would all presumably still be alive as well if they hadn't met violent ends.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

I don't actully count the cast of CSI as 'avatars' since they are fictional characters. However you're right in that the casts of Mythbusters and American (Avalon) Choppers are under my list of avatars, along with people like Jackie Chan and the band Rush.

-------------
Lead me not to temptation, for I can find it myself.